Programmers must learn English?

A popular site for programmers on the internet, Stack Overflow, recently openned a new site in Portuguese. This caused a lot of controversy among the users of the site. In their view, the beauty of Stack Overflow is that when you have a problem, all the solutions are there in one spot↲. They feel that by supporting other languages, the answers to questions will be more fragmented and more difficult to find. On the other hand, Stack Overflow was recieving a lot of internet traffic from Brazil but was not seeing very much participation from Brazilians. They felt that there were a lot of talented programmers in Brazil who would participate more if they were allowed to write in Portuguese. The text below is from one of many programmers who learned English through programming and feel that it’s a bad idea to support other languages.

Should All Programmers Learn English?

I haven’t read all the comments, so forgive me if I’m just repeating the same things (on another note, I hope I am).

This is a horrible idea, if you ask me. Language barriers are there because there are languages. If you keep supporting languages, there will still be language barriers.

English speakers, especially Americans, feel bad about “making people speak their language”. I have seen this many times. But it’s just ridiculous. We don’t need more than one language. Having more than one language:

1) Creates a language barrier, thus slowing down advancement.
2) Gives people a reason for discrimination, just like nationalism, racism, and religion.

When you say that “If just one little girl in Brazil sticks with↲ programming because an answer on this site helped her finish her first project, well… that’s not good enough!”, it sounds like a really humble thing to do, but it in fact is the opposite. You are overlooking↲ the fact that there’s a lot of information regarding↲ programming and many other things in many different languages already. I’m not a native speaker of English, and I learned English thanks to my interest in programming. First I started with reading stuff in my own language, then I realized that I could learn much more if I read stuff in English. And that’s how it should be.

I don’t care if it’s English or any other language, but we only need one language, not three, not two, only one. The rest is just noise↲.

To wrap it up↲, disguised by a seemingly humble thing, you are supporting↲ language barriers, by supporting languages. I’d expect better from you guys.